


Force, or Pleasure and Power

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dubiously Consensual Telepathy, Existential Crisis, F/M, The Vault (Doctor Who), Vault Porn (Doctor Who), force field play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:22:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22300039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: 101 Ways with a Force Field x Telepathy Is Not Therapy
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	Force, or Pleasure and Power

She presses her joined wrists into the valley between her thighs. The cuffs colour, hot with the hum of proximity actuation. 

She looks straight into his eyes as the blue intensifies; she’s pushed her hands up under her skirts, the hems hitched past her boots, layered fabrics falling from the gather in a cascade of felt and frill. 

The hum becomes a buzz as she brings the cuffs into contact with her body. The sound she makes is not entirely intentional. 

He stares, transfixed, failing to stop her. 

~

It's the membrane between them, selectively permeable, infinitely manipulable, a tool, a toy, a safety net. They stretch its boundaries, they alter its shape. They define and redefine it, day after day, probing at the edges of what it means to them, of what they mean, in this place.

~

He trails his hand over her skin, the light, for once, innocuous, not innocent but safe, fine, allowable. 

She’s draped herself over the closed top of the piano, as she likes to do, her head supported on her propped arm. With her other hand, she's scrolling idly through a menu of settings. For now, she's chosen pressure, a pillow of resistance in the palm of the Doctor’s hand. He touches her without touching her, a two-way transmission of sensation without friction and without thought. 

Heat, that's a good one. Or röntgen, invigorating if somewhat regressive. The Doctor pauses, lingers over the soft spot between the side of her breast and the inside of her upper arm. She gestures at the control pad, and the solid field collapses into a spike of sparks that arc out at her—a sting she controls. 

She inhales, letting her lips fall open. He startles back, pulling his hand away as though he's been burned. 

~ 

Or before the piano, he shuts her into the empty space it will one day occupy, until then only a birdcage or a display case, the cell within a cell. Wall after wall goes up, and she inside, watching them light up around her, closing her in. 

She can handle this, she repeats to herself, she's been in worse, she's stood it before.

Then he turns away. 

She flings herself at the field, the impact engaging the array in a display of energy and force. It only repels her, exactly as hard as she went at it. 

She does it again and again until he looks at her, his face impassive, and with his hands behind his back, she can’t tell whether it’s real or faked, careful or uncaring. 

~

Maybe, at first, he watches her from outside the vault. But, eventually, he must tire of it; he isn’t made for it, actionless vigil whose only reward is something he hasn’t been able to convince anyone he’ll receive. 

She stops, she gathers herself. She is still. 

She can be still a very long time. 

When he returns, she is kneeling in the centre of the platform, hands in her lap, head bowed. The walls are gone, popped like soap bubbles. In their stead, a line of taut light anchors her in place.

~

A quantum fold does this: it prevents you from becoming. It stops the very quarks of you from deciding whether to be this or that, to go tits up or arse over, it turns time into a meringue and traps you in the sticky crystal goop. It is a secure and effective form of stasis, and it's cruel—if you're still alive. The designers of the vault never intended she would be. They prided themselves on it. 

A quantum fold prevents you from becoming, but it doesn't stop you trying to become.

A single night within the confines of the secured vault leaves her frantic. She could have been there an hour or a hundred years. She’s crouched by the door when the locks disengage, one by one, only the Doctor’s caution preventing her from exploding into the straight time beyond it. 

He catches her and she strikes out at him, and for a moment they are a confusion of limbs, his arms a thin circle around her, her fingers wild claws against the fact of his flesh. He edges her over the threshold into the dimness of the vault’s interior, fumbling at the jamb behind him. 

He lets go. Something pushes her backwards, rebuffing her advances. It’s physical, an invisible wall, a strong wind. It’s riot shields, it’s a legion. It shimmers on the cusp of seeing, and it closes in around her, corrals her into the corner like an animal.

Her lip lifts. “Their locks weren't enough for you? Did you really have to add a layer of your own?” 

“You tried to get away.”

“Don’t leave me in here again.”

“I have to. We promised.”

“When have we ever done anything we _promised_?”

~

It’s for her protection. It’s the price for her life. No one is coming for this tax, and yet they make their faithful payments, day by month by year, the shallow movements of the planet bringing its sun nearer and farther and nearer again, though she can’t feel its heat on her face. 

~

For her protection: what a racket! As on the execution planet, it is the Doctor one should fear, the Doctor laughing and extreme and full of confidence and emotion. 

It’s when the things hidden in his eyes work their way up as a sneer, when the anger he tries so hard to suppress surfaces on his mouth and in his hands that the forcefield works in reverse, repelling him while preserving her, cultivating her calm with her hands behind her back while he rages, helpless, spitting. 

~

It’s their alternative to the quantum fold. Their compromise. 

He shrinks it down around her, like a shield or an outline, like a sheath of incorporeal cellophane, enveloping her in a cushion of air. It crackles when she moves. Her hair lifts under the field; her pores are pinpricks. When he goes to touch her, it feels as though he isn’t really there.

~

The field heats and hums with the effort of keeping them apart. He’s been outside of it for too long, sat beyond its boundary, fingertips in his mouth, studying her. She edges up to the glow, raises her hand, and very gently leans her fingers on the barrier. 

It pushes back, very gently, against her. 

She wiggles her fingers, and four points sting her, warning nips. She pushes again, and a wavelet of blue follows the motion of her hand. The Doctor’s fingers drop to his thigh. Oh, now he’s awake. 

Both hands, now, against the field, its reluctance becoming hot resistance. She presses. It nips her. Her hands jump back. The Doctor’s watching. She tries again, this time suppressing the reflex that jerked her hands away. It’s a riot of blue and orange, writhing with the energies working to repel her from it. She sweeps her arms above her, filling her field of vision with colour. She stops with her hands either side of her head, palms flat. She shifts her balance onto her arms. She lets the full weight of her body rest on the plane of contact between her skin and the searing energy field.

The Doctor is on his feet. 

She trains her attention on the alarm on his face, using it to ignore the pain, which is irrelevant. There is no heat, she tells her body. There's no radiation, no electricity. 

There _is_ pressure, and then she forces a step, and then there's constriction, suffocating, and then another step, and another, and then, at length, she's through the field. 

She catches her balance. And she loses all control of her legs, and she falls. 

~

She did it because she could. For the same reason he put her in the field in the first place: not because he thought it would contain her, but to show that he knew he should. 

~

Here, then, is something he shouldn't do. He brings her the control unit for the field. He unfastens the buttons at his throat. He gets onto his knees. He’s not flinching as he looks up at her, serious and full of intention. 

She raises an eyebrow at him. When he doesn't blink, she looks down at the device in her lap. 

The collar she fashions for him is tall and solid. She takes almost everything out of the mix, everything that hurts. 

“And this is trust?” she asks. 

“I’d say it's a test.”

She closes the collar around his neck. He swallows. She takes one of his hands and she folds his sleeve back, and then she fastens a cuff around his wrist. She does the same with the other. The faint glow of the collar reflects in his eyes like the ring from a gas fire. 

She tethers his hands together. She sits back. 

“You always did look good like that,” she says, “but you've always hated it. What is it that you want in exchange for this...trust exercise?”

He tells her. 

~

She controls the touch. But he controls the contact. Although in the world, it is her hands that are free to seek and search and stroke, in their minds, he's taking her by the hand and pulling her along. 

Some of it is good. Some of it is security and meadows and those endless, sunslit days. Some of it is stars. 

The Doctor’s sorrow, his regret, his wistfulness for something that doesn’t exist soaks the scenes. Or maybe it’s her wistfulness. It doesn’t matter. 

The guilt over the things that are not so nice, that’s his. At first. 

~

His feelings are like the energy field, drawn tight around her throat. She lives with them pressed tense against her skin. A crowd full of demands, they get inside of her. She didn’t know—

They hold her down in the dark. They hold her open, raw. She is caught in their vise, their pickaxes on her brain. His memories come around and around, and then they’re his feelings about his memories, distilled and terrifying and so big, and then her own memories surface through them, bubbles in sludge, gasping for breath in lightless air. 

~

There was pleasure, once. There had been happiness. He says it was wrong to relish killing but she remembers the surge of anticipation, extending her thumb to blot someone out of existence, the give of life from the world, resistant at first and then collapsing, the satisfied revulsion, the smear of blood, the tension and the relief, the power and the control and the creativity. 

Now, she sees the bodies littered in her wake. Now, they jostle with her inside the forcefield. She can’t imagine wanting anything ever again, except for this to stop. 

~

He tries to touch her. His hand is on her skin. But she can no longer tell whether the field is in between them, or whether he is angry or annoyed or worried or wary. His eyes terrify her; they’re motes of fire, incandescent full reflections shining hot on her, too bright, too watchful, too intent on her vulnerability. 

His fingers burn her and also they’re not there at all. His palms on her jaw, his thumbs on her cheeks, she thinks she remembers from before. Then, his hands on her shoulders, his hands on her hips; he holds her but it’s a restless contact, moving on almost immediately to her waist, her ribs, the small of her back. 

He pulls her in; he stares down at her. He pushes her, lightly, just enough to tip her off balance, off her feet. The forcefield catches her, now a wall, truly just a force holding her up. 

She hikes up her skirt. Maybe, if he's closer to her, maybe if his touch reaches to her core, maybe then, maybe. He squeezes her thighs. He strokes the lower curves of her buttocks. He kneads the inner part of her legs, where it's tender like the belly of a fish. The wall softens to the shape of her body, as though he is going to embed her in it. 

~

She picks out a sequence at the keyboard, a meandering motif morphing into outlined ambiguities, arpeggiations without tonal centre. He's got too much limb and length to be curled up under the piano, yet there he is, knees to his chest, head ducked. He's drawing idly with his fingers on the inside of her knee, thinking silently aloud about nothing much beyond immediate physical stimuli: the texture of her skin at that particular point of her body, the sensation of the vibration of strings under great tension, wrapped steel, struck, held by cast iron and encased in a box of highly polished wood, and him, in its underbelly, listening. 

She lets her knees drift apart, an enticement as the chords find their way to a stable key at last, and immediately destabilise again in a stack of perfect and augmented fourths—a snap and a sparkle, and the Doctor’s hand flies back, bitten by the forcefield hidden under her skirt. 

His palm is red between white welts where her trap has caught him. Her own flesh, unmarred, cries out in recognition. She feels some satisfaction, she can still feel satisfaction from something like this, at least. 

~

He’s talking to himself in her head. So many Doctors, and all of them bickering, all of them lecturing, his voices inserting themselves relentlessly for no reason, overwriting her own. When she tries to think, they say things, fragments of sounds and sentences she's never heard him say but could. They squeeze her out of herself, thin her out like air, and she doesn't know how to exist, how to be a person with the Doctor so loud and all the time. She breathes, her hearts beat, her cells respire, but she is nothing, it’s only a mechanism that doesn’t know how to stop. Its mind is a magnetic tape and its body is a speaker on which the unbearable volume has burst the membrane, and still the Doctor’s voices are everywhere, it’s vibrating with them, as though hit repeatedly with felt-wrapped hammers, as though strung through with thick, bright wires and plucked, plucked, plucked. 

~

What’s a little decay, what are drumbeats and alien bodies and executions to this pain? She has hollowed herself to the skin, she has splintered all her bones, and drawn them out like swords, scoring her viscera as they go, and she has filled herself with the Doctor, and with his sorrow and his remorse and his angry eyes, piercing through her sins. 

~

She makes the field opaque, she makes it viscous, milky, a cataract, a crashing, flooded obstruction behind which she hides, screened and safe where he can’t see her. 

He doesn’t have to see her to know what she’s doing—he can taste the salt of her tears on her tongue; he can feel them tightening high in her sinus—but it’s better this way. To be looked at would be one exposure too many. To be seen like this would make her too vulnerable. She covers her mouth and bites her breaths down into silence.

~

He reaches through—the Doctor can ignore discomfort, too—to rest his hand on her shoulder. He touches the back of her neck, where he can rub her skin with his thumb. She suppresses the need to flinch away, and the contact becomes something consoling. She leans back into his hand, and he cups her skull. He works his fingers through her hair, which lately has lost its careful arrangements. It’s going frizzy, growing crimped, getting tangled. He combs his fingers through the snarls. Though he’s slow, though he tries to be patient, the hair catches again and again, pulling sharply on her scalp. 

Eventually, she disengages the field, removes the barrier between them. 

~

She drops it over her head, lets it slide over her skin, like a silk underrobe. It forms itself around her body, like his breath, his mouth, intimate, close over every millimetre of her. Warm. To feel its touch is to feel alive and know that her body is real. 

It defines her edges. It limits her motions, when she wants it to, when she cedes to the Doctor the controls that harden her armour, ossify it so that it is solid, and she is held immobile. 

If she's ephemeral and mutable, then the minute rebellions of her muscles remind her who she is, what she is, that she is, fighting her limitations and finding something in the struggle. 

~

“Wouldn’t you like it, oh, so much, if it were a leash? A choke chain? If you could slip it around my neck and take me on a walk, out on one of your jaunts, free of this cellar, this prison, this dungeon? If you could escape the gravity of the place without breaking your purported promise, safely, with the insurance of the device around my neck, to jerk on if ever I should misbehave? Would it make you feel good? Would it make you feel better? Would you let me pull and pull while you hold the lead in your fist and keep me at bay and let me cheat myself out of breath? Would you?”

~

“If you like it, put a ring on it,” she adds, apropos of the smallest form of the forcefield yet. 

~

She’s in the crook of the piano, upper body sprawled over the closed top. From the waist down, she’s wearing nothing, her skirts discarded on the bench as though she were still sitting there, even her boots removed and empty below it. She’s on her tiptoes. The Doctor is behind her with the forcefield in his hands, molding it into shape, a cold, molten glass of hard light. 

This is the time for her to take his hands, to guide them, her mind over the narrow lines of their tendons and bones; this is the time to slip into his marrow as he has slipped into hers. 

She's content, though, at first, merely to observe. “You're very self-confident,” she says of the dimensions of the thing he's making. 

The Doctor says nothing for a moment while he works. “I think maybe it's you who’s over-confident,” he finally answers, thoughtful, mildly teasing. 

When he's completed it to his satisfaction, Missy does take control. She doesn’t ask, she isn’t going to; they’ve been waiting what seems forever for this. She shunts the feeling into him, mirroring their sensations so that he is the one pressed up against the piano, and she is the one putting his hand between her legs. 

She tilts her hips. Touches and spreads and positions with his fingers. The toy is as smooth as something pretending to be solid can be. Her muscles are straining, from calves, pulling up on the elongated line of shin and ankle, to gluteus, stretched out over the angle of her bending hips; she’s all sinew and strength, curvature and definition. 

She relaxes as well as she can for the Doctor’s toy, for the zip of its energy against her arse. When it’s inside her, she breathes, all her attention focussed. Even at its narrowest, it holds her exposed, shows her to be flesh on the inside as much as any other creature. 

She allows him to use his own hand. To press and massage while she watches with his eyes. But she makes use of his other hand, unzipping him and holding him and stroking him, until finally he’s hard. 

~

She forgets, once she has him inside her as well, whether he’s moving his body or she is, which of them is puppet and which is meant to be holding the keys to the shackles that keep them prisoner. 

~

It’s the tether between them. It’s holding them together. If an oath isn’t enough—and of course it’s not—there’s this. 

He'll come to her alone, and they'll sit, doing nothing, the perimeter inactive but present behind them. It’s the magnetic bottle that contains her, that allows her to exist, being and becoming, in spite of him: the genie of the place. 

They’ll drink tea. They’ll read. He’ll make his wishes, touching her without touching her. They’ll think about smoke, smoke that’s set to sympathetic vibration by the strings struck through it, shone through but at an angle, about what he’s shaping out of movement, out of the play of light in smoke.


End file.
